The Birds of Oppenheimer

 The Birds of Oppenheimer

Last year’s powerful film Oppenheimer moved people in many different ways and was granted many awards. Given my professional activities, my interest in the film embraces many dimensions. One worth capturing on this blog is the film’s depiction of the landscape and its wildlife, which was my preoccupation for three decades (still burning strong today).

The siting of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos is a story documented by numerous historians and popular science writers, in greatest detail in “American Prometheus,” the fabulous book by Bird and Sherwin that inspired the movie. Oppenheimer had strong connections with northern New Mexico that trace back to his childhood. Although his professional life was centered at other places (Berkeley, Pasadena, Princeton, and Europe), he returned many times to vacation in New Mexico, ultimately purchasing a cabin there at the southern end of the Pecos Wilderness in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range, east of Santa Fe. Today there are Forest Roads passing quite close to the cabin site; I went to that general area many times for hiking and wildlife watching, so I have a profound understanding of the allure. When Groves and Oppenheimer sought a site to build the bomb, they initially looked at picturesque Jemez Springs, northwest of Albuquerque in the southern part of the Jemez Mountains (American Prometheus p. 205). Groves didn’t think much of the canyon location, so Oppenheimer suggested the Pajarito Plateau, where he had taken long horseback rides on his visits. (Those rides must have begun in Santa Fe, not the inconveniently remote cabin location in the Sangre de Cristos.) The film depicts this search briefly but plausibly. Oppenheimer knew about the Los Alamos Ranch School on the plateau, and suggested that Groves consider it. (“Los Alamos” refers to the gallery forests of cottonwoods in the wet spots of the canyons.) Oppie would have known at that point that the view is inspirational and the mesa tops suitable for construction. The jeep ride from Jemez Springs to Los Alamos, along logging roads, must have been quite an adventure in the early 1940s, and would have taken easily a half day. But Groves was sold, and history was made. Hans Bethe and George Kistiakowsky were two of the legendary scientists on the project who appreciated the selection of that site, bringing back their own childhood memories of the Swiss alps, and they spent spare hours hiking up to the peaks above the project site. (My late professional colleague Tony Arrington was a graduate student of Kistiakowsky’s, who was raised in Kyiv Ukraine and then taught chemistry at Harvard.) They also carved ski trails out of the forested slopes – Kistiakowsky put leftover explosives to good use to bring down the bigger pine and Douglas Fir trees. (He needed practice on implosion design, after all.)

Gallina Canyon, Jemez Mountains. Ponderosa Pines that have escaped the axe. I don't know if Oppenheimer ever made it there, but it is the kind of place he talked about often.

The plateau where the Los Alamos laboratory is situated today did not get its name until quite late in the history of human settlement and use. The predecessors of today’s native American Northern Pueblos used the plateau about a thousand years ago (and likely much longer); ancient cliff dwellings can still be visited today in Bandelier National Monument, in Frijoles Canyon and other places. Early Spanish settlers left their mark in the 1600s-1700s; they carved wagon paths and brought livestock to graze, cut firewood, and expanded on the trails that the native Americans had left. Adolph Bandelier and Edgar Lee Hewett studied archeological sites on the plateau in the late 1800s. The story goes that Hewett thought the plateau needed a name. He must not have gotten input from the numerous Pueblo people who were close by, or maybe they did have names for it that Hewett chose to ignore.  But he landed on “Pajarito,” which means “little bird” in Spanish. I have wondered which little bird Hewett was inspired by. If he spent a lot of time there in July and August, he would certainly have seen four species of hummingbirds visiting the abundant penstemon wildflowers (Broad-tailed, Black-chinned, Rufous, and Calliope Hummingbirds). Or maybe he noticed the flocks of Bushtits using the Pinyon Pine and One-seed Juniper that were abundant on the mesa tops. Or the many Pygmy Nuthatches in the tall stands of Ponderosa Pine.

The southern tip of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as seen from the Pajarito Plateau. At sunrise in December.

When it came time to film the 2023 movie, the director was faced with a problem of his own. The town and lab of Los Alamos are thoroughly developed, and the kinds of uncontaminated views that Oppenheimer appreciated no longer existed. So Christopher Nolan opted for Ghost Ranch, about an hour’s drive north of Los Alamos. It is a place of great beauty. With red rock cliffs looking over a wide valley, it is generally regarded as one of the most beautiful spots in the state, which Georgia O’Keeffe would reiterate. The iconic figure of Cerro Pedernal (“flint hill”) towers over the southern edge of the valley through which the Rio Chama meanders (or did, until Abiquiu Dam was so rudely imposed in 1959).

Cerro Pedernal looming above Ghost Ranch on a winter morning

Ownership of Ghost Ranch is a combination of private, US Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management, preserving the kind of vistas that have provided backdrops for many films. The bird life of Ghost Ranch shares much in common with pre-development Los Alamos, making it a nice substitute, as you can experience today driving along Route 84. Like much of the land in the state, Ghost Ranch is both arid and overgrazed by cattle, which is a shame. But movie cameras don’t get close to the plants, so the defect is glossed over. A few other scenes capture Oppie moving with friends on horseback through the landscape, and these were mostly filmed in central Santa Fe county, where the Ortiz Mountains, Sandia Mountains, and Sangre de Cristo Mountains provide the backdrop. I know this because I recognize the peaks in the camera footage, and because the landscape is clearly pinyon-juniper (“P-J”) scattered among forbs. I spent many thousands of hours making my own bird-finding drives in that area along Rte 14, Rte 285, and the intervening dirt roads. (I carried out Breeding Bird Surveys for almost twenty years.)

Last week I watched Oppenheimer for a second time, so I could pay more attention to the details. It was a reminder for me of a dramatic device used by sound editors of Hollywood movies. When the action shifts from an indoor conversation to the outdoors, the sound editor sprinkles in a few bird sounds to cleverly clue in the audience. Listeners who are birders like me have this secondary auditory experience as we watch. It is mostly a pleasurable one, but with caveats. Hollywood sound editors don’t pay much attention to using the right bird sounds in the right locations. This is not just a minor issue for us; we spend huge amounts of effort searching for birds in local patches of suitable habitat at suitable seasons and time of day, so this stuff matters – a lot. Movie sound editors obviously choose bird sounds that are loud and distinctive to make an impression. That’s reasonable, but I wish they would try harder to get the right ones. So, specifically, “Oppenheimer” at about the 1:01 mark shows Oppie rolling into the lab site at Los Alamos to the call of a Cactus Wren. At the 1:27 mark, Kitty searches for Oppie on horseback in a dark, late afternoon canyon with snow patches on the ground, and a Carolina Wren sings out.

Cactus Wren, on a Cholla cactus near Blue Grama grass. Santa Fe county, NM

Those are North American birds, so what is there to complain about? Plenty. Cactus Wren is not a bird of the Pajarito Plateau. It is common in southern New Mexico, where the landscape is a lot lower, flatter, and more arid. Now to be sure, Cactus Wren is slowly on the march to the north. Most of us believe this can be attributed to overgrazing by cattle that has caused Cholla Cactus to move north and to colonize flat sunny spots where the competition from palatable grasses has been eliminated. Cactus Wren really likes Cholla, because it provides perfect sites for nest building, and it probably supplies the right kind of insect life for Cactus Wrens to thrive on. In recent decades, the northern extent of the range of Cactus Wren had been Socorro (Hubbard, John P. Check-list of the Birds of New Mexico. 1968), quite a ways south of the lab site that was being portrayed in the film. Those of us who bird in Santa Fe county got kind of excited when Cactus Wrens moved in and set up shop in 2014. Today, they seem to be entrenched there, at least in small numbers. But they are still restricted to places like the Caja del Rio plateau, across the Rio Grande and east of the Pajarito Plateau and significantly different because of the slope, predominant vegetation, and soil conditions. Cactus Wren was non-existent as far north as Los Alamos in the 1940s, decades before range expansion kicked in. So, sorry sound editor, but that particular bird call is incongruous in that setting.

How about Oppenheimer’s Carolina Wren? It is one of the loudest and most distinctive bird songs in North America, heard commonly because they are well adapted to human residences. But, as the name suggests, it is a bird of eastern North America, not New Mexico. West of the Mississippi, the wren family is represented more by Bewick’s Wren, Canyon Wren, Rock Wren, Cactus Wren, House Wren, and Marsh Wren. Here again, it is important to point out that Carolina Wren is slowly expanding westward. Nobody is quite sure why this is happening, because the North American west was never thought to provide the right habitat. Perhaps it is growth of human settlements. So Carolina Wren started to gain a foothold in New Mexico near Socorro on the Rio Grande, in dense riparian areas, in the late 1990s. I found one in Santa Fe county in the autumn of 2016, but it was a brief visit only. In the 1940s on Pajarito Plateau? Certainly not, as attested by published sources on bird distribution. (The most recent and most detailed of these is the treatise by ornithologist Sandy Williams.)

Carolina Wren. A rare vagrant at the Santa Fe Canyon Preserve, 2016.

The service provided by film sound editors is a vital one. I think it is wonderful when a film is enhanced by the right bird vocalization in the time and place of the film script. It adds an element of authenticity and realism. But, jeez guys, get it right. Bird songs and calls can only very rarely be captured by the microphone in the filming process, so they are almost always added in at post-production. Today we have voluminous sound libraries  that are available  at everyone’s fingertips – let’s use them! In the case of “Oppenheimer”, instead of piping in a Cactus Wren, it would have been great to use sounds of Pinyon Jay, Acorn Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, Western Wood-Pewee, Ash-throated Flycatcher, Plumbeous Vireo, Steller’s Jay, Juniper Titmouse, Black-headed Grosbeak, Bullock’s Oriole, White-crowned Sparrow – so many to choose from. Instead of the ringing song of Carolina Wren, it was a missed opportunity to use Canyon Wren, one of the most beautiful North American bird songs. They are commonly heard today in Los Alamos Canyon, above the town. Or how about a Grace’s Warbler?

Canyon Wren. Diablo Canyon, Santa Fe county, New Mexico

I make the same plea to Ken Burns, who has created so many wonderful films about American history. Burns’s editorial team makes frequent use of bird sounds, adding much to the film experience. But there are too many times when they choose a jay, oriole, sparrow, or warbler from the wrong side of the continent or the wrong elevational range or the wrong season. Surprising, in light of Burns’s exceptional focus on accuracy.

In years of watching films and television documentaries, I have found it amusing to note what bird sounds are selected to populate the soundtracks. One common call is the Boreal Owl. Ironically, Boreal Owl is one of the most difficult species to find in North America, at least when it is singing, which happens only when the snow is too deep for humans on foot. Not so rare in movies. Prairie Warbler is a frequent guest on programs, often mislocated in western places where it doesn’t occur. The fierce call of the Red-tailed Hawk is frequently heard on television ads. It is a piercing, descending scream. Amusingly, though, it usually accompanies the video image of Bald Eagle. Apparently, Madison Avenue thinks that the very different, whimpering call of the eagle is not what it should be, if you aim to sell stuff. British period dramas are fond of using the repetitive call of the Chiffchaff and the low hoot of the Eurasian Collared Dove. For Africa, the favorite seems to be White-browed Coucal, which I have nicknamed the “David Attenborough Bird.”

Red-tailed Hawk, Jemez Mountains, New Mexico

One additional comment about Oppenheimer pertains to the weather. The Trinity Test, the first explosion test of the newly designed bomb, occupies much of the middle part of the movie. The scene depicts a long delay in the test, at today’s White Sands Missile Range, due to a rainstorm. The portrayed project scientists and technicians don thick rubber raincoats or huddle indoors in a fierce, wind-driven rain. It appears to last for hours, causing everyone to mill about in nervous anticipation. In New Mexico, in mid-July?  Wait a minute. It doesn’t rain like that in the southwest. July is the month of afternoon thunderstorms, and it rains alright, but in any one location, it never rains for more than about fifteen minutes. The rain can be intense, but brief. And on a hot summer day, it usually feels nice to let your clothes get a little wet. In my thousands of hours of bird finding in the southwest, I never took a raincoat with me. Historical accounts say that there was a storm delay on that famous day (or infamous, to some). It was highly unusual that there was storm activity in the early morning at 4:00. But it was only a short one, and the intensity of the storm was “hollywood-ized” in the film as a tension-building device for dramatic effect.

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There is a tragic side to the otherwise compelling story of the site selection of Los Alamos. While the Pajarito Plateau provided enough flat spaces for the bomb development work, the plateau was subdivided by canyons with small and slow-moving streams. The canyons became the inevitable repository of chemical waste from the handling of nuclear materials. In the desperate scramble of wartime, there was no time even to consider waste disposal. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, national standards for waste treatment were lax because fate and transport of chemicals and radionuclides was not well understood. Technologies improved in the 1970s and later, reducing outflow to the canyons, but the damage was done, and the canyons accumulated legacy materials. Analytical chemistry technologies made enormous strides during that same time, enabling the precise determination of even the most trace radionuclide quantities in soil, vegetation, and rock, and there are multiple, well-documented contamination areas that are known today. A program  exists today to keep track of these legacy sites, but unfortunately there is no practical way to clean up all of them without destroying the canyons as ecologically important areas for wildlife and spring runoff management. Ironically, if Oppenheimer had less love for New Mexico’s topography and scenery, and Groves had chosen some flat, featureless area for the Manhattan Project, the chemical and radionuclide waste problems would be far less pressing today. But that’s not the way it worked out.